I've been exploring Go for building small, fast and self-contained binary applications recently. I'm enjoying how there's generally one obvious way to do things and the resulting code is boring and readable - and something that LLMs are very competent at writing. The one catch is distribution, but it turns out publishing Go binaries to PyPI means any Go binary can be just a uvx package-name call away. sqlite-scanner sqlite-scanner is my new Go CLI tool for scanning a filesystem for SQLite...

SaaS is the most profitable business model on Earth. 1 It’s easy to understand why: build once, sell the same thing again ad infinitum, and don’t suffer any marginal costs on more sales. I have been writing software for more than half my life. In the last year itself, I’ve talked to hundreds of founders and operators in SF, from preseed to Series E companies. And everyone is constantly talking about the threat looming over the industry, that has changed how our entire industry think...

Eleventy started as a side project. Now it’s a critical infrastructure for thousands of websites. TL;DR: Open source isn’t broken. But the way we fund it often is. Let’s talk about what actually works. In this episode, we sit down with Zach Leatherman, creator of Eleventy (11ty), to talk honestly about what happens after open source succeeds. From nap-time coding and nights-and-weekends maintenance to venture capital pressure, burnout risk, and the reality of funding long-lived develop...

Visited Palmanova plenty of times in my life but never paid attention the writings at the center of main square. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs Visited Palmanova plenty of times in my life but never paid attention the writings at the center of main square. Thank yo...

Announcement: Before we begin the article, I’m thrilled to share that apart from running my flagship  Moon Monday blog+newsletter, I’m continuing with the Open Lunar Foundation  and its nice team for another year to help communicate the non-profit’s  research work of forging technical and policy building blocks for cooperative and peaceful lunar exploration globally. It’s a mission that aligns extremely well with the ethos of Moon Monday. 🌙 Disclaimer for transparency:  ...

I now see how it can be addictive: A mindblowing experience and feeling like I see the world a bit differently. A feeling of being super smart and powerful. Getting lured in with free samples then everything costs. How it grabs my attention when using it, and then when I am not using it, I yearn to get back in. Is it productive to think of generative AI as a new drug? I have been thinking of a project in the decentralized web arena and trying to find someone to hire or inspire to tr...

I write a lot of Makefiles . I use it not as a command runner but as an ad-hoc build system for small projects, typically for compiling Markdown documents and their dependencies. Like so: And the above graph was generated by this very simple Makefile: graph.png : graph.dot dot -Tpng $< -o $@ clean : rm -f graph.png (I could never remember the automatic variable syntax until I made flashcards for them.) It works for simple project...

Recently this post from @Merocle caught my eye: I'm fixing my iFixit soldering station. I haven't used it for a long time and the battery has gone overdischarge. I hope it will come back to life. Unfortunately, there are no replacements available for sale at the moment. Devices with built-in rechargeable batteries have been bugging me a lot lately. It's convenient to have a device you can take with you and use anywhere. And with modern Li-ion cells, battery life is remarkable. Re...

SINGAPORE (February 4, 2026) — Shield AI and ST Engineering signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) at the Singapore Airshow to collaborate on advancing ST Engineering’s next-generation autonomous solutions. Under the agreement, both companies will integrate Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy software across selected ST Engineering platforms to enhance autonomous performance. ST Engineering will also assess the Hivemind software development kit (SDK) to support the indigenous Singapore-le...

I received a bunch of feedback on The Haneda Problem post, some of which was negative in a way that I thought missed the point. I suspect I didn’t do a great job articulating what I meant. But I did get a kind response from Alison Wilder that was worth discussing. (Another of you wrote a blog post that you since deleted. If this was a mistake let me know, and I’ll add your link back in). She [and the person above] broadly summarised The Handea Problem by breaking it down into two t...

Eight years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. Every year, I post an update about how that’s going and what my life is like as an indie founder. Previously on… I don’t expect you to go back and read my last seven updates. Here’s all you need to know: 2018 - 2020 - Quit my job and created several unprofitable businesses. 2020 - 2024 - Created a product called TinyPilot that let people control their computers remote...

I am hosting the IndieWeb Book Club for this month, in which everyone interested is invited to read and write a blog post about The Art of Explanation: How to Communicate with Clarity and Confidence [ Goodreads link ]. The book was authored by Ros Atkins, a BBC journalist whose career has spanned radio on the BBC World Service and television on BBC News. I read this book toward the end of last year and loved that the advice given was tactical, engaging, and interspersed with stories. I’d h...

Given any string of bytes, you can convert it to an hexadecimal string by mapping the least significant and the most significant 4 bits of byte to characters in 01...9A...F . There are more efficient techniques like base64, that map 3 bytes to 4 characters. However, hexadecimal outputs are easier to understand and often sufficiently concise. A simple function to do the conversion using a short lookup table is as follows: static const char hex [] = "0123456789abcdef" ; for ( ...

Vertical boring machine, via Industrial History . Welcome to the Reading List, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Some housekeeping items: Continuing with the new reading list format this week, this time with a paywall ~1/3rd of the way down. I got some feedback that folks liked a little more analysis, so I’ve expanded that a bit more. As a reminder, this is intended to be a little bit more comprehensive than the older format, a...

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you will have noticed this week that a project of my friend Peter went viral on the internet . It went by many names. The most recent one is OpenClaw but in the news you might have encountered it as ClawdBot or MoltBot depending on when you read about it. It is an agent connected to a communication channel of your choice that just runs code . What you might be less familiar with is that what’s under the hood of OpenClaw is a little coding agent...

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.” ― The Lord of the Rings Last year, I made a decision to take a five-month sabbatical (an extended leave from work). Tomorrow, my journey will finally begin! 🌴 I mostly want to travel the world, but I will also focus on self-discovery and pushing my personal limits. Route My goal is not to visit all the touris...

It's been a year since I invited Americans to join us in a pledge to Share the American Dream : 1. Support organizations you feel are  effectively helping  those most in need across America right now . 2. Within the next five years, also contribute  public dedications of time or funds towards longer term efforts  to keep the American Dream fair and attainable for all our children. Stay gold, America. 💛 Personally, I’ve become a big believer in one particular quote, especially conside...

Wandering around maze known as the Computer Science building at Oxford I found the computer science library. Rarely these days do you see a library (and a librarian) devoted to computer science. The librarian found their copy of The Golden Ticket and asked me to inscribe and sign it, just like at Dagstuhl , perhaps the only other active CS library I know of. It brought back memories of the early 90s when I would often head to the  Math/CS library at the University of Chicago to track down s...

I was going through the list of CIDR papers this year and looking for ones that were relevant to my interests. If you're not familiar with CIDR as an institution, it's basically the "short, kind of kooky" database papers conference. You're more likely to find things that are a little looser, a little more speculative, a little more off the wall, and a little more self-contained. I enjoyed On the Vexing Difficulty of Evaluating IN Predicates , which is relevant to my interests as far as "surpr...

I've been thinking about how this site may be able to live on after I'm gone. Maybe it could become a family heirloom? I’ve thought about this topic more generally before , but this one is specifically about blogging. This blog is by far the hobby I have sunk the most time into over the last 13-ish years, and I’d like to think I’ll continue as I head from middle age, to old age. Let’s say I live until I’m 80, I will have spent over 50 years of my time on this earth writing con...

It’s February! This means I have been at the JKU for four months. Four months with teaching Compiler Construction and System Software , lots of new responsibilities (most notably signing off on telephone bills and coffee orders…), many new colleagues, and new things to learn for me, not least because of the very motivated students and PhD students here. And when I say motivated, yes, I am very surprised. While the attendance of my 8:30am Compiler Construction lectures was declining thro...

Originally, I was drafting this in September, planning on dedicating it to Windows 10 Home becoming EOL. I also figured I’d share a meme that contained something along the following: Instead, however, it’s early 2026, and I feel like a dedication to RAM prices would be a more fitting start: Memes aside, the lightweight laptop - what I’m typing this post on - has a whopping total of 2 GB of ram (1. Originally, I was drafting this in September, planning on dedicating it to Windows 10 Home ...

In my YouTube channel, for some time now I started to refer to the process of writing software using AI assistance (soon to become just "the process of writing software", I believe) with the term "Automatic Programming". In case you didn't notice, automatic programming produces vastly different results with the same LLMs depending on the human that is guiding the process with their intuition, design, continuous steering and idea of software. Please, stop saying "Claude vibe coded this soft...